Rail Against the Machine

Conservatives do not like public transportation—or so libertarians and Republican officeholders tell us. If that means we must spend hours stuck in congested traffic, so be it. Under no circumstances would conservatives ever ride public transit.

Except that we are riding it, in growing numbers. Studies of passengers on rail-transit systems across the country indicate many conservatives are on board. Chicago’s excellent METRA commuter trains offer one example. A recent survey revealed that in the six-county area METRA serves, 11 percent of commuters with incomes of $75,000 or more commuted by train. In Lake County, the mean earnings of rail commuters were more than $76,000. (The figure for bus riders was less than $14,000.) Not surprisingly, the area METRA serves regularly sends Republicans to Congress.

So why are conservatives using the public transportation we are told they oppose? Because being stuck in traffic isn’t fun, even if you are driving a BMW. On a commuter train or Light Rail line, you whiz past all those cars going no-where at 50 or 60 miles per hour—reading, working on your laptop, or relaxing, instead of staring at some other guy’s bumper.

Still, libertarians shriek, “Subsidies!”—ignoring the fact that highways only cover 58 percent of their costs from user fees, including the gas tax. To understand how conservatives might approach transportation issues more thoughtfully, we need to differentiate. All public transit is not created equal. You will find few people with alternatives sitting on buses crawling slowly down city streets. Most bus passengers are “transit dependents”—people who have no other way to get around. But most conservatives have cars; they are “riders from choice,” people who will only take transit that offers better conditions than driving. They demand high-quality transit, which usually means rail: commuter trains, subways, Light Rail, and streetcars.

Here we see one of the absurdities of the Republican position on transit. During the recent Bush administration, it was virtually impossible to get federal funding for rail-transit projects; buses were offered instead. But most Republicans’ constituents are served by rail transit.

The perception that conservatives do not use public transportation is only one of the mistaken notions that has warped the Right’s position on transportation policy. Another is that the dominance of automobiles and highways is a free-market outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth. Were we to drop back 100 years, we would find that Americans were highly mobile. Their mobility was based on a dense, nationwide network of rail transportation: intercity trains, streetcars, and interurbans (the latter two electrically powered). Almost all of these rail systems were privately owned, paid taxes, and were expected to make a profit. But they were wiped out by massive government subsidies to highways. Today’s situation, where “drive or die” is the reality for most Americans, is a product of almost a century of government intervention in the transportation market.

Another misperception is that public transportation does not serve conservative goals. Again, to understand the real situation we must differentiate between buses and trains. Buses do help the transit-dependent get to jobs, but for the most part, it is rail transit that serves conservatives’ goals. Subways, Light Rail, and streetcars often bring massive economic development or redevelopment of previously rundown areas. Portland, Oregon built a new streetcar line, a loop of just 2.4 miles, for $57 million. It quickly brought more than $2 billion in new development. The small city of Kenosha, Wisconsin put in a streetcar line for just over $4 million. It immediately brought $150 million in development, with another $150 million planned. Not surprisingly, both cities are expanding their streetcar systems. Buses have no such effect on development because a bus line can be here today, gone tomorrow. The investment in track and overhead wires streetcars and Light Rail require tells developers the service will be there for years to come.

Another conservative goal rail transit and intercity passenger trains advance is energy independence. One of America’s greatest national-security weaknesses is our dependence on imported oil, most of it coming from unstable parts of the world. One of the Bush administration’s objectives in invading Iraq was to secure a major new source of oil; predictably, we got war but no oil. Electric cars may eventually become practical, but optimists have been disappointed before: Thomas Edison was certain that the necessary breakthrough in battery technology would occur in his lifetime. In the meantime, trains can be electrified, and even when diesel-powered they use fuel far more efficiently than do automobiles.

The list of reasons that the libertarian/Republican policy of opposing public transportation, especially rail, is wrong could run many pages. A more interesting question is what a thoughtful conservative position on transit might be.

Russell Kirk offers a starting point for crafting an answer. He said that the first conservative political virtue is prudence. And there is nothing prudent about leaving most people immobile should events beyond the pale cut off our oil supply, as happened in 1973 and 1979. At present, half of all Americans have no transit service, and of those who do, only half call it “satisfactory.” The effects of suddenly stranding half the population are grim to imagine, not least on our already shaky economy. Grimmer still is the prospect of going to war to seize the missing oil. Prudence suggests the first goal of a conservative transportation policy would be to provide options, ways to get around without a car.

Conservatism offers a further guidepost: a predilection to turn to the past for answers to today’s problems. My old friend and colleague Paul Weyrich and I discovered that, as children in the 1950s, we shared a favorite television program: “I Remember Mama.” Each show opened with a modern woman being baffled by a contemporary problem. Then, reverently, she would say, “I remember Mama …” and the viewer would be transported to the 1890s, where Mama would demonstrate how an earlier generation had resolved the same difficulty. Conservatives like to remember Mama.

In transportation as in many things, the past was in some ways better than the present. Thanks to the Pullman Company, the night boats, our cities’ excellent streetcar systems, and the fast, electric interurbans that connected cities with towns and the countryside, earlier generations weren’t merely transported like so many barrels of flour. They traveled. Today, whether driving on the bland Interstate Highways or flying, Americans are just packaged and shipped.

So to Russell Kirk’s prudence let us add a conservative motto: what worked then can work now. In practical terms, where do these twin starting points lead conservative transportation policy?

First, we need a National Defense Public Transportation Act. As late as the 1950s, it was still possible to travel from anywhere in America to pretty much anywhere else in the country on a network of buses and trains. But President Eisenhower’s National Defense Interstate Highway Act, which has poured $114 billion into highway construction, killed the privately operated passenger train. We’re left with only a shadow of a wraith of its ghost in Amtrak’s skeletal national system.

A National Defense Public Transportation Act would seek to recreate that lost network of trains and buses, bit by bit as we can afford to do so. It would offer every county that choose to participate—conservatives believe in local options—a bus timed to connect its largest town with the nearest intercity passenger train. As time went on, it would thicken the network of trains so that a journey was made more by train and less by bus.

For cities, conservatives’ banner should read, “Bring Back the Streetcars!” It is no coincidence that the decline of America’s cities accelerated when streetcars were replaced by buses. People like riding streetcars, while few like riding buses. Streetcars are “pedestrian facilitators.” It is easy to hop off, shop and have lunch, then get on the streetcar again when feet get tired. Pedestrians are the lifeblood of cities; it is no accident that the first three chapters of Jane Jacobs’s great book The Death and Life of Great American Cities are about sidewalks.

Buses do have a role to play, mostly as feeders for rail lines. Express buses that run directly from outlying suburbs into city centers can also draw “riders from choice.” These buses can be electrified with two overhead wires; unlike diesel buses, trolley buses neither smoke nor stink. San Francisco still has a nice network of them, thanks to all her steep inclines.

With streetcars should come two other revivals from the past: interurbans and night boats. Interurbans were big, fast streetcars—often very fast, running at 60 to 80 miles per hour in the open countryside. Interurbans connected big cities with outlying towns. Ohio alone had more than 2,000 miles of interurbans, all running on electricity. Today, just one remains, the South Shore between South Bend, Indiana and Chicago.

On the Great Lakes and major rivers, we also had night boats, wonderful steamers, often side-wheelers, that connected cities like Cleveland with Buffalo and Detroit. Like night trains, they offer no-real-time travel. Board in the evening, enjoy a good dinner in the grand salon and a restful sleep in your cabin, and arrive at your destination at the beginning of the next business day.

One point conservatives should insist on in reviving our trains, streetcars, and interurbans is keeping costs down. The greatest threat to a revival of attractive public transportation is not the libertarian transit critics. It is an unnecessary escalation of construction costs, usually driven by consultants who know nothing of rail and traction history, are often in cahoots with the suppliers, and gold-plate everything. Overbuilding is omnipresent; some Light Rail lines (the current term for interurbans) look as if they were designed for the Shinkansen. We are now seeing construction cost figures for streetcar lines of $40 million per mile and for light rail sometimes of more than $100 million.

A simple management tool could quickly bring costs into line: “should cost” figures. These are standards based on experience; anything that exceeds them should require very detailed and highly convincing analyses. For streetcars, the “should cost” figure ought to be $10 million per mile, and for light rail, $20 million. Lines have been built for that, and less.

In our book, Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation, Paul Weyrich and I offer a chapter titled “Good Urban Transit: A Conservative Model.” We illustrate a variety of ways to keep costs down, beyond “should cost”: using existing rail infrastructure (the head of one transit system told me, “In my city, they wanted to spend $1 billion to build an 18-mile Light Rail line parallel to an existing double-track railroad.”), running streetcars on existing Rapid Transit lines to access the suburbs, and perhaps most important, avoiding the foxfire allure of high technology.

All the technology needed to run electric railways, and run them fast, was in place 100 years ago. It was simple, rugged, dependable, and relatively cheap. In the 1930s, many of America’s passenger trains, running behind steam locomotives, were faster than they are now. (After World War II, the federal government slapped speed limits on them.) There is no need for Maglev, monorails, or other innovations. All these do is drive up costs, reduce reliability, and make the unhappy user dependent on proprietary technologies. Simplicity is a virtue when it comes to transportation policy.

That past/future transportation network of course includes automobiles. But Americans would no longer be dependent on cars. Our mobility wouldn’t be held hostage by events overseas. Nor would we have to drive to leave the house, regardless of weather, old age, traffic congestion, or the myriad of other conditions that make automobiles less than convenient. We will still use cars to go to the grocery store; no one wants to lug home ten bags of groceries on a streetcar. But for commuting to work, going downtown to a show or game, or traveling to see Grandma or on business, we would not be harnessed to the horseless carriage. America’s motto would no longer be “drive or die.” Many people, not just conservatives, might find that an attractive proposition.

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17 Responses to Rail Against the Machine

You ask valid questions – and I believe conservatives should be challenged on any and all issues they oppose.

Nonetheless, you don’t appear to think like a conservative/libertarian when you use the across-the-board cliché that our oil supplies can be cut off upon some whim. This is pure fancy. Yes, prices may spike due to some event (we assume in the mid-East, but it can come from anywhere) but the USA has varied oil suppliers, the largest being Canada. Indeed, conservative solutions of more domestic and offshore drilling would decrease further the risk of US oil supply becoming to concentrated on one source.

Regarding public highways – indeed, a true conservative solution would be local road and peak time pricing. A conservative should argue that the Federal Government building an interstate system has been a huge subsidy to the auto and oil industries.

Finally, with regard to mass transit/public transport. You think like a liberal when you assume it must be a Federal solution. Why? It is simply a question of “Top-Down” vs. “Bottom Up.”

Prior to 1950, when rail and bus connected every city in the country, I would imagine the Feds were hardly involved at all. It was mostly a private rail system, with privately run bus companies. The involvement of the Federal Government has destroyed that pleasant state-of-affairs you referred to.

Most important – as a Conservatives/Libertarian I do not oppose mass-transit. Why would I? If Chicago wants to build a bigger subway – let them build it and fund it. Their local voters know what they need, and can manage it best.

IF on the other hand, you have a Federal Gov’t, using borrowed/printed Fed-Dollars as “stimulus,” deciding it wants to push mass-transit, giving money to those states with the best lobbyists or influential Senators, with mandates of politically connected union labor, or XX% of business guaranteed for special interest groups, and mandates for
“carbon friendly” trains, living wages, or a host of other such nonsense – then what may be an economically efficient project quickly becomes a boondoggle. That is a VERY different thing – and should be opposed.

William Lind and I have been on opposite sides of the transit debate for the last 20 years. His argument that conservatives ought to support public subsidies for rail transit because conservatives either ride it or can profit from the urban development along the tracks overlooks even more important reasons for why conservatives ought to oppose it.

The conservative philosophy of government has never been one that has focused on what goodies government can deliver to conservative constituencies. Tapping into the public treasury in order to dole out loot is the liberal/socialist philosophy of government. Conservatives should rightfully shun opportunities to get aboard the gravy train. Subsidies are the path to bloated government budgets and insolvency.

A very cogent reason for why conservatives should oppose subsidizing rail transit is that it is, by far, the most expensive means of urban transportation. When ALL costs are considered (capital as well as operations), on average, the cost per person-mile of travel by bus is twice that of travel by car. The cost per person-mile of travel by train is twice that of travel by bus. Consequently, a city’s decision to implement rail transit is one that will obligate its taxpayers to cover huge and perpetual financial burdens.

The notion that rail transit can make a significant dent in traffic congestion or air pollution is pure wishful thinking. At best, we might expect rail transit to account for one to two percent of the travel under normal circumstances in most cities. This small reduction in automobile travel is often offset by congestion caused when rail transit occupies city streets. The City of Phoenix’s environmental impact study, for example, projected that its light rail transit system would actually slightly worsen traffic congestion and air pollution.

Publicly owned and operated rail transit is a symptom of the government overrerach that conservatives have opposed since at least the FDR years. True conservatives ought not be seduced by promises of “cool rides.” We have no chance of being taken seriously in our efforts to cut back the tendrils of the nanny state if we can’t hold the line against something as wasteful and ineffective as rail transit.

John Semmens
Chandler, AZ

John Semmens worked for the Arizona Department of Transportation for 32 years before retiring in 2008. He has written numerous papers and magazine articles on public transit issues.

There is another aspect of transportation that a true conservative should also look at. Granted, it is marginal, in that it has limitations – the fitness of the user, climate, and range – but, within that range, it can out-perform ANY mode of public transit – it is guaranteed door to door, and requires NO additional infrastructure. It is – as you might have guessed – the bicycle.
In a range of about five miles, it is every bit as quick as any transit – except, possibly, those operating on private rights of way. It is almost as fast as the private car – and has a far less onerous operating cost.
What, then, does it need? Only two things – a) enough people on bikes to ensure that motorists do see bikes and their riders, and b) education of all drivers (motorised and non-motorised) alike) as to how to deal with this thing on the road. The simple fact is that no additional infra-structure is required. Our streets, paved or not, will serve the cyclist as well as any motorist. Parking facilities are far less expensive that for cars – occupying much less possible business space. Further, there are a wide range of spin-off benefits to the rider – health and general fitness being the greatest of these – at NO ADDED COST to the cyclist. In fact, there is a great saving of time and energy here, for the cyclist, in just doing what he must to get to and from work, is spending the equivalent of at least a single session in a Gym – using time that would be spent in transit to and from work. Then there is the benefit to mental health that comes from the exercise. I’ve been employed in a job that can – if one let it bother one, induce a great deal of stress, a Government job, in short. Yet, just the work of getting myself to and from work on a bike has gone far to ensure that I can see the world in a sane, reasonable manner. All annoyances – all the petty fighting of the work-place – can be worked out in a furious ride – which, then, serves to get me where i need to be so much the faster.
Granted, it is not for every one – a certain level of strength and a certain amount of competitiveness is required, to make it work. The climate can also work against it – cycling in high heat and humidity – can be done, but it tends to leave one a sweaty mess. Rain – not a question, unless one MUST be point-device in ones clothing at all times. In my experience, one has no choice, you WILL get wet – out-side in, or the other way. Cycling on snow and ice IS possible – now. (How I dreamed of studded bike tires in my youth, to ease that awful gap in the winter when one simply could NOT ride.) but it takes a very determined person to do so.
The biggest beauty is the lack of necessary public cost – and the individual level of investment.

“You think like a liberal when you assume it must be a Federal solution.”

Actually, I’ve always thought “You broke it, you fix it” was a conservative value, taught to me by my parents. I’d agree with Mr Rath if the Federal Gov’t wasn’t so heavily involved in not only breaking the original setup, but in continuing to subsidize the road systems. It’s that blood-red hand that makes it a federal issue, from my viewpoint.

The only really conservative solutions I see to the issue are to drop all road subsidies completely and require they all be self-supporting by user fees such as tolls or gas taxes, or subsidize rails to a similar extent, simply to restore the level playing field the govt took away years back. If passenger rail travel can’t be done profitably with no more subsidies than the auto/oil/hiway industries get, they deserve to disappear, period. As it is, they didn’t die; they were murdered.

My comment is in reference to your statement, “We will still use cars to go to the grocery store; no one wants to lug home ten bags of groceries on a streetcar.” There are dozens, perhaps hundreds or even thousands, of us low-income folks in the Denver metro area who rely on two-wheel pull carts and local buses to carry our groceries home. My bus route serves Denver, Lakewood, and bus stops, going and coming, beside the only supermarket near downtown Denver. We cannot purchase cars and our mobility relies solely on this bus line. All buses have lifts that are used not only for wheelchairs, but also for grocery carts and baby strollers. I am fortunate, in that I can walk to two grocery stores, one of which is a Walmart only one mile from my home. I will gladly “lug home … bags of groceries” on the West Corridor Light Rail when it is completed in 2013, one block from my apartment.

Regarding bringing home the shopping, there is at least one viable option that doesn’t involve trains or automobiles: cargo bicycles.

This is only really practical in a dense urban area, but the utility of a good cargo bike (a Dutch “bakfiets”, a Danish “Nihola”, and others) is hard to pass up once you’ve done some research into the matter.

We’ve seen our cargo bike business slowly grow over the past year, and with commodity market instability on the horizon, shopping via a well-built cargo bike is a trend to look for.

I read this, and Portland was mentioned, and then I thought of all of the Portland rail stations I know, and virtually all of them are magnets for criminal activity. They eventually bring that activity to every neighborhood they touch.

Also, I don’t think rail lines are particularly family friendly or ever will be. I mean, unless true conservatives want their kids surrounded by gang members, meth-heads, whores, homeless people with mental problems and so forth. This article really makes no mention of the valid reasons why many nice suburban conservatives *don’t* take public transit. Car accidents happen, sure, but I suspect a lot of parents who are able to do so would prefer to have their kids watching Disney movies in mini-vans than expose them every day to what goes on on public transit.

The “benefit” of Portland-to-Clackamas development, additionally, is highly questionable. A lot of those houses are now sitting empty and the developers are bankrupt or struggling. As with the Obama administration, the extremely liberal Portland city government is obviously going to spin its massive, over-reaching public works projects as unquestionably beneficial to everyone. Currently, they are spending “somewhere between” 613 million and 1.5 billion dollars they don’t have to make the city EVEN MORE bike friendly — it’s currently rated something like #2 in the world. This money will eventually come from law enforcement cuts, and, it is rumored, will be in part borrowed from some of the city’s basic utility funds. If this isn’t crazy liberal overspending, I don’t know what is.

Q: Why do conservatives turn into subsidizers when it comes to cars, roads, parking space and oil?
A: It’s the only way to prolong the idea that you can always travel between gated communities and corporate car parks without having to rub shoulders with icky colored people and muslims.

You ask valid questions – and I believe conservatives should be challenged on any and all issues they oppose.

Nonetheless, you don’t appear to think like a conservative/libertarian when you use the across-the-board cliché that our oil supplies can be cut off upon some whim. This is pure fancy. Yes, prices may spike due to some event (we assume in the mid-East, but it can come from anywhere) but the USA has varied oil suppliers, the largest being Canada. Indeed, conservative solutions of more domestic and offshore drilling would decrease further the risk of US oil supply becoming to concentrated on one source.

Regarding public highways – indeed, a true conservative solution would be local road and peak time pricing. A conservative should argue that the Federal Government building an interstate system has been a huge subsidy to the auto and oil industries.

Finally, with regard to mass transit/public transport. You think like a liberal when you assume it must be a Federal solution. Why? It is simply a question of “Top-Down” vs. “Bottom Up.”

Prior to 1950, when rail and bus connected every city in the country, I would imagine the Feds were hardly involved at all. It was mostly a private rail system, with privately run bus companies. The involvement of the Federal Government has destroyed that pleasant state-of-affairs you referred to.

Most important – as a Conservatives/Libertarian I do not oppose mass-transit. Why would I? If Chicago wants to build a bigger subway – let them build it and fund it. Their local voters know what they need, and can manage it best.

IF on the other hand, you have a Federal Gov’t, using borrowed/printed Fed-Dollars as “stimulus,” deciding it wants to push mass-transit, giving money to those states with the best lobbyists or influential Senators, with mandates of politically connected union labor, or XX% of business guaranteed for special interest groups, and mandates for
“carbon friendly” trains, living wages, or a host of other such n

In reply to John Semmens, I must address a few of your claims. As a libertarian conservative myself, I considered myself strongly aligned with the pro-transit faction of conservatives. Let’s not kid ourselves– transportation is costly by all modes, but the reason modern conservatives do not support public subsidies for mass transit is simple– the false perception that it is wasteful spending, the preservation of the highway and associated industries, and the affinity with cultural conservative characteristics like low-density land uses and automobile dependence.

First, the congestion argument is a huge straw man. Transit advocates who have thought about this realize that mass transit does little to relieve congestion. But it doesn’t mean to. The available transport capacity acts as an alternative, meaning that commuters can choose to commute congestion free or choose not to. But let’s consider other options, like expanding highways. This solution has not helped at all, whatsoever. Induced demand, a common phenomenon observed among transportation engineers, merely brings congestion back to similar or worse vehicle-capacity ratios as before. The only way to significantly reduce congestion is to: 1) reduce road capacity thus reducing overall aggregate vehicle travel times, 2) implement road pricing or tolling, or 3) allow for economic recession or peak oil to reduce demand.

As far as your assertion that urban mass transportation is the most expensive, that is partly due to the lopsided subsidies that highways received to begin with. If you factor in highway capital costs, the vehicle purchase price, gasoline, parking fees, insurance, and other driving-related costs, then it is much more expensive to drive. We are not even including subsidies like oil and parking.

Urban rail transportation, on the other hand, can move the greatest amount of people for each marginal dollar, and can be the most efficient use of tax-payer dollars if complementary land-use policies follow suit.

It all comes down to a simple equation of geometry. If we’ve realized that we can’t get rid of congestion, it tell us one thing. The cities we live in are not meant to support high rates of SOV commuting. Various other countries have yielded billions in economic development from efficient urban mass transit systems. Why can’t America do the same?

This is absolutely unequivocally NOT the time to take on large amounts (or small amounts, or ANY) new debt! Period, end of argument! End the deficit, pay off the national debt, then lets talk! Oh, and we are so far behind in maintaining our existing road infrastructure it is already in line for funds when available.

A key issue missing from the subsidy discussion is an examination of subsidies per passenger mile traveled. By this most relevant metric, subsidies for inter-city passenger rail are astronomical. I don’t think it is wise to subsidize passenger transportation in any mode but complaining about high subsidies for highway travel while ignoring the stupendously high subsidies for inter-city rail travel is disingenuous or worse.

Here is an experiment. Pick a location and distance say Dallas, Texas to Houston, Texas or Saint Louis, Missouri to Kansas City, Missouri or Denver, Colorado. Allow a transportation company like Southwest airlines to develop and manage a rail line for those routes. Provide the same amount of subsidization to the rail system asis provided for the interstate highway system on those same routes and measure costs/mile over a period of time. Then remove the subsidies for both and allow a transportation company to privatize the highway system and again measure the costs/mile to travel and maintain the distance. I truly don’t know which would be more cost efficient.

As for Stu’s comments, if you want to pay down the debt, privatize the road systems. Sell them off for their true cost and value. Then allow the operating companies to pay taxes on the revenue generated.

Please try to envision cities that people really want to live in. Try to imagine transportation systems that move people conveniently, quickly, pleasantly, and cost-effectilvely. We waste far more time and money getting from here to there in this country than any society in the world, and our cities are the laughing stock of the developed world for their lack of attractive public space and quality of life.
What would we do if we really wanted to make things better? Improve the city? Minimize public and private expenditure on transportation?
From that perspective, it makes sense to maintain roads and bridges, but everything we do to expand the car system looks like digging the hole deeper.
As a fiscal conservative, I’d like to see us spend our household and government money in the most cost-effective way over the long term. Any reasonable accounting of our present system and survey of the many alternatives proven effective in other places shows that we could be spending our money more wisely.
Wherever cities are attractive to tourists and a smart workforce, and where the time/money investment in transportation is small, there are two key features: streetcars and cycle tracks.
Maybe you’ve never seen what happens to a neighborhood when streetcars and cycle tracks are installed–the shopping, the kids, the new businesses. Maybe you don’t want to read on the way to work, or bike to work instead of going to the gym (and stop for groceries on the way home of course). If you are one of those who simply can’t imagine getting around without your car, streetcars and cycle tracks are the only hope you have of emptying the highway of the rest of us.

Here’s a reason for car lovers to want public transportation: They can have more of the road to themselves. Also, I think conservatives and liberals will agree that we have a congestion problem and I think we can agree on one thing: More roads=more traffic

I’d like to thank Paul Wyerich and William S. Lind for their articles and giving a conservative perspective. And honestly, this is my favorite quote: “So why are conservatives using the public transportation we are told they oppose? Because being stuck in traffic isn’t fun, even if you are driving a BMW. On a commuter train or Light Rail line, you whiz past all those cars going no-where at 50 or 60 miles per hour—reading, working on your laptop, or relaxing, instead of staring at some other guy’s bumper.” That’s what I like about riding transit, I can sit, read, think, do stuff and let someone else worry about the driving. You can do a lot more on transit than driving.